They were conversing quietly when the scene froze anew in the light projected by the windows upon the semicircle. With their heads very close together, the two of them remained on stage, the young woman paralyzed like Lot’s wife on the road to Segor (“I shall give you my daughters! I shall give you my daughters for you to know them and conceive in them! All of you use them and heal your sickness before the One, The One Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken, destroys this city as punishment for your sins!”); he was stopped at the very moment he was closing his briefcase, still listening to her.
“What does that mean? What place is this, where in the United States?”
“How many times must I repeat that nothing is anything and probably we’re not anyone? As for the place, I know it very well because I live there now. But its name doesn’t matter, because every point on earth is the same point. We’re on the edge of a different period in my life,” the apparition continued. “Though you, in your innocence, or rather your ignorance, couldn’t predict it. Everything happened as you’re going to see it, though it could’ve happened some other way.”
“Everything? What’s everything?”
“Nothing, just like us, as I just told you so you could immediately forget it. You’re incorrigible,” replied his grotesque, aged double. “But I won’t lose the hope of educating you, if you remain in my nightmare. Prepare to witness the most didactic of spectacles.”
(WHY DON’T YOU PRETEND YOU’RE CRAZY AND BE ACQUITTED?) The madman, or madmen, who controlled the magic lantern of a sort, changed slides but not protagonists. A window covered by Venetian blinds, like the ones he had seen during a distant summer in Vermont, opened onto a copper late afternoon, similar to the ones that had dazzled him so often when he left the Columbia library or on the bridges over the East River. At the height of the windowsill, and in a room that the half-light infused with a vague aquarium atmosphere, stood a bed with a yellow bedspread, identical perhaps to the one on his single bed in the Rosales house. Yet in this new retrospective incarnation, he had never taken refuge on Calle de Angulo or been pursued like a mad dog, because he had stayed in Madrid, obeying an accurate presentiment. In a whirlpool of memories and contradictory feelings, where for a few moments he thought he might drown, his recollection of the single bed where he had spent so many nights awake, trembling and afraid he’d be arrested before dawn, became confused with the other bed on stage, at the bottom of the Venetian blinds, in the scarlet of dusk. A shriek of horror, scandalized though not free of a certain complacency, very similar to the one Falla perhaps gave vent to when he read for the first and last time the “Ode to the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar” and the dedication that began it, broke off at the back of his throat. In the bed next to the window, slim and with white hair, the way he had looked in the classroom but completely naked now, he was embracing the girl with very green eyes, like Fernando de Rojas’s Melibea or Marcel Proust’s Albertine, who was completely naked too. They were going to make love but were still talking in whispers that spread throughout the theater in hell. They were going to make love, with the inevitable fatality that very soon the sun would set, perhaps in obedience to identical laws, but their intimate murmurs sounded all over the theater. “I never was with a woman before,” he confessed, “with men, yes, and perhaps with too many because I desired very few and loved even fewer. I did love others and never dreamed of going to bed with them. (‘I looked into his eyes. He lowered them and his shoulders seemed to collapse under the overcoat tailored in London. My attendants, the flamenco boys, began to smile at one another and exchange depraved whispers.’) My ode to Whitman is my proof of identity and my confession.” “I was with only one man, my father, who raped me a year before he killed himself,” replied the girl with green eyes who perhaps was a youth in Sodom though she was also a lesbian in Gomorrah. (La femme aura Gomorrhe et l’homme aura Sodome.) “Since then I’ve made love with several women, whom I never desired though I couldn’t repudiate them either. I thought I gave myself to them out of hatred for my father and all men. Now I see that in their embraces and caresses I was looking for you without realizing it.” “You also must have looked for your dead father in me, since at my age I could’ve been him,” he replied, holding her to his body. “You would’ve looked for him to bestow your forgiveness, because the same wind will sweep away all flesh and perhaps he raped you to justify his suicide. If we don’t have the courage to pardon one another, we won’t deserve having been born.” The sun set and night came through the window. From the orchestra seats, and perhaps because he had never loved anyone, man or woman, the way he loved his poems, or to put it more precisely, his own vertigo, standing at the boundaries of the universe when he created them, he thought of his verse where the evening left with the night over its shoulder. On the stage, darkened now, there were sounds of moans, groans, murmurs, sobs, panting, and howls. Afterward, nothing, only silence. An interminable silence.
“Was this absolutely necessary?”
“Necessary or not, that’s how it happened,” the apparition replied.
“And afterward?”
“Afterward? Did you believe perhaps that life is a serialized novel? There is no afterward or before. Only an eternally perishable present whose fiction yellows in photographs.”
“Or in the theaters of hell.”
“Or on the stage of this nightmare of mine, which you insist on calling your hell. So be it, if it makes you happy, but don’t miss this scene, which will be the last.”
The scene changed again and in a sense revolved around itself. Now he saw the garden that the bedroom window, protected by Venetian blinds, overlooked. Completely transformed into that ghost, with the same head and identical tanned age, he was pruning laurels at the foot of some pines. A flock of blackbirds, like those at the rear of The Garden of Earthly Delights, flew beneath a slate-colored sky. (“In the midst of these people I’d live enclosed in an invisible bubble, like an alien. Like those lovers in Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights, imprisoned in a soap bubble or a bladder mislaid at a witches’ Sabbath.”) That woman, the one with green eyes like Melibea or Albertine, came to the window and called him by name. From the orchestra, it took him a few moments to recognize her, and he could identify her only by her voice when she began to speak to him in English. She too seemed older or prematurely aged, with short white hair around a face where only her eyes, perhaps of a Jewish girl of the Renaissance or a youth who had been a girl, like the Mercuries of Giovanni da Bologna in the precise words of the poet Rubén Darío, on the eve of the Great War, and at the time that two bullfighters rode in a calash past The Fallen Angel to the astonished admiration of some Granadian provincials, and as a gay, confident world lazed indifferently at the wrath of God ready to destroy it, only her eyes were the same. “The cultural attaché of the Swedish embassy called and is on the phone. He is desperate to speak to you and says they’ve given you the Nobel Prize in Literature for … let’s see if I remember exactly, ah, yes! una contribución sin precedentes, unprecedented contribution to the poetry of Spain and to Western Civilization, a la poesía de España y a la civilización occidental. No, no, excuse me! To the Cultural Heritage, la herencia cultural de la civilización de Occident. You can’t tell me it doesn’t sound harmonious and beautiful even though it seems somewhat rhetorical.” From the bottom of the firmament the blackbirds returned, tracing a figure eight in the sky. He left the pruning shears on the ground and waited, looking at them, open and motionless, like a parody of a stork, while he rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Listen, what shall I tell this man?” She pretended to be impatient. “You could tell him that so notable a distinction doesn’t belong to me because my life is a loan. I’m convinced they would have murdered me in Granada, just as they killed my brother-in-law Manolo, if I had boarded the Andalucía express on the afternoon Martínez Nadal took me to the station. (‘Rafael, I changed my mind and I’m staying in Madrid. Please, go to the compartment and bring my suitcase. Don’t ask me anything now.’) If I survived it was at a very high price, since from that time on my poetry has seemed the work of a stranger: a man very different from me who is embarrassed that all of you wrote so many theses on his dead work. Standing shades make up the literary kingdom of Mr. Nobel, that right-wing dynamite maker. But in the final analysis, I must answer to my conscience for what I write. Tell this Swedish gentleman that I renounce his prize in order not to repudiate myself.” “It would be better if you told him personally.” “I will in due course. As soon as I finish cutting the laurels,” he replied, shrugging his shoulders. The two burst into laughter and the scene shattered like a stained-glass window broken by a stone. Then the stage sank into the darkness of a dreamless sleep.